by Iris Origo
The remaining years of my father’s life, and in consequence the first eight years of my own, were mostly spent in travel from one country to another, in the vain pursuit of health.
The first two years of their marriage, after a difficult winter in hotels at Portofino and Sestri Levante, were spent in California, an experience to which they had both looked forward with great expectations, but which at first they found somewhat disappointing. The little town of Nordhoff in the Ojai valley seemed to them uninteresting and remote, their cottage was dirty, unsanitary and ill-furnished, and the sense of isolation much greater than they had expected. Gradually, however, the beauty of the surrounding scenery and of the climate, the wonderful rides up mountain tracks, the making of a few close friends and, for my father, the editing of the local paper, The Ojai, reconciled them to their life there, though it did not bring my father the recovery he had hoped for. Then the relentless quest began again: first a sanatorium in the Adirondacks, where he was given a ‘tuberculin’ treatment which was then new, but appears to have done him more harm than good; then two winters in a chalet at St. Moritz, some months in a sanatorium at Davos, springs and autumns on the Italian lakes, and two winters in Egypt.
Re-reading the letters of that period—impatient, rebellious, courageous, reckless, unbearably poignant—I have often thought (though tuberculosis was then considered a disease from which only the rich could recover) that these years would have been less tormented if every possibility that money could provide had not been open to him. California or St. Moritz? A sanatorium in the Adirondacks or in Switzerland? His distracted parents would advocate one course, his young wife, still hoping to keep some element of adventure and beauty in their lives together, would press for another. His parents undoubtedly sometimes felt that, in her wish for a more normal and varied life, as well as owing to her preoccupation with her own health, she did not fully realise how ill her young husband was. Friends and relations contributed their advice. Endless letters and cables—all full of good intentions, all showing a deep undercurrent of anxiety and desire for control on the part of the older generation, and of an exasperated desire for independence on that of the younger—crossed and re-crossed the ocean. A further complication, too, was added by my father’s determination only to go where he could do some work. ‘I don’t know why I want so much to work,’ he wrote to Ben Diblee, ‘but I’m quite sure I shall never be satisfied until I do.’
It would, I think, be entirely mistaken to measure this craving, which certainly shortened his life, in terms of achievement: no-one realised more clearly than he how little there was to show, and I feel sure that ambition, too, is not a sufficient explanation. A strong sense of public duty was certainly one factor, as well as an intense interest in American public life, which, in spite of the example of Theodore Roosevelt, was still considered a very odd field for a gentleman to enter; to this was added the constant sense of ‘Time’s winged chariot’. ‘I was reading a book yesterday’, he wrote to his brother Bronson on the latter’s fourteenth birthday, ‘which makes a birthday to me a very sad time.’ (He was then twenty-two.) ‘It was the life of John Stuart Mill, who by the age of thirteen was not only acquainted with every masterpiece of Greek and Latin literature, had studied Euclid and the differential calculus, but had attained such a mastery of political economy that from his summary of conversations with his father the latter was able to write a book on the subject that made an epoch.’ He went on to enumerate Mill’s other achievements before the age of twenty-three, commenting, ‘This seems to me to throw Napoleon and every other youthful genius far into the shade,’ sadly adding, ‘I always hoped to accomplish something, and I feel that your chances are twice as good as mine once were … Of course I may get all right and be good for something, but what a time wasted!’
Six years later he was condoling with Bronson on the latter’s first haemorrhage and the interruption of his work that it inevitably entailed. ‘Nothing’, he wrote, ‘can make it anything but desperately hard to bear. For years you are going to be handicapped; you are going to see other fellows go ahead of you all along the line, and must learn not to mind. You’ll have to think about fiddling matters of health which seem at first a destruction of manhood.’ But he also believed (and rightly) that his brother would recover and be able to undertake the public work which he already knew to be, at least partially, closed to himself.
‘If I were your age,’ he wrote to Bronson, ‘there is only one thing I could think of doing today—going into politics … I am too ashamed of the figure we cut as a nation—possessing as I think we do the best individuals, the best raw material, to be found anywhere—to take even a moderate interest in other aspects of American life, compared to the political.’
Meanwhile, wherever he happened to be, he flung himself with intense activity into whatever interest was at the moment available: learning Italian and making Italian friends, in particular Guido Cagnola, and developing a great addiction to the opera in Milan, studying architecture and painting in Tuscany, and, when laid up in Switzerland, collecting with passionate absorption every fragment of evidence with regard to the Dreyfus case.1 One of his most striking characteristics, according to Justine, was ‘his flaming fury at any wrong done to someone else, regardless of the person or how remote that person might be from his own life. Any injustice or wrong aroused this indignation’, and an immediate desire to do something about it. In the case of Dreyfus, this of course was not possible, but this characteristic was certainly one of the deepest reasons why he could not resign himself to being cut off from public life. He never gave up the hope of being ‘good for something’ at last and, meanwhile, through all his years of illness he always found something to which he could turn his hand, even if the actual job was not in itself very interesting or important. In California he edited the local paper, The Ojai; in Italy he accepted the post of American Vice-Consul in Milan, and relieved his rather pedestrian duties by writing a paper on international law for an examination for the diplomatic service, which is still preserved in the State Department as a model of its kind, and an official report on pellagra, then prevalent in some parts of Northern Italy. Above all he never allowed himself to give way to any form of invalidism: whenever any kind of work seemed possible again, life and hope returned with it.
After his death Edith Wharton, with whom, in spite of the difference in their ages, he had a close and lively friendship, wrote some perceptive comments on this aspect of his character:
It might almost be said that the only way in which he betrayed his lack of strength was in his constant untiring struggle to live as if he were unaware of it: to be forever up and doing with the careless unconsciousness of health. The effort to crowd so much endeavour, so many impressions, so much work and so much enjoyment into his measured days confessed, perhaps, to a haunting sense of their brevity; yet there was nothing feverish or rebellious in his haste … The impression one had to the end was that, though he knew he was gravely ill, and had early to make his terms with that knowledge, yet he knew so many other things more interesting, more impressive and more immediate, that his individual plight was quite naturally dismissed to the remoter planes of consciousness …
Perhaps the distinctive thing about him, in this respect, was that his tastes were so inwoven with his personality. I have never known an intelligence in which the play of ideas was so free, yet their reaction so tinged by the elusive thing called ‘character’. Coolness of thought and ardour of moral emotion dwelt together. He cared passionately for politics, economics, all manner of social and sociological questions, and cared for them practically, reformingly, militantly. Yet he contrived—young as he was—to keep a part of himself aloof from the battle and above the smoke, and to look down on the very conflict he was engaged in.
Two gifts of his rich nature helped him to this impartiality: his love of letters and his feeling for beauty. Nothing so clarifies the moral sense as a drop of aesthetic sensibility … The result was a receptiv
eness of mind and a tolerance of heart …
When, on December 28, 1908, the tragic news came of the Messina earthquake, Bayard at once set off for Sicily, to re-establish an American Consulate in Messina, and to act as a special representative of the American Red Cross. His official report, while giving a tragic picture of the general devastation, is unlike other such documents in one characteristic respect: the scene before him was described with deep and active compassion, but also with the intellectual detachment of a historian. Beneath the debris, the flames and the curling smoke he saw, in the lie of the land, of the harbour and the hills behind it, ‘the real Messina, what an ancient phraseology would call its formal and final causes. With those fertile hills, with that spacious harbour situated on a principal trade route, Messina will always be a city. Houses and inhabitants there will always be to embody the Messina idea, to fulfil the Messina purpose.’
Meanwhile many thousand dead lay beneath Messina’s ruins—and perhaps as many more were buried there alive. One of the things that first struck my father—apart from the sheer horror of the human suffering before his eyes—was ‘a strong impression of the Oriental affinity of the Sicilians. Their mood was one of submission, unsurprised and unassertive, to the hard hand of fate. They did not rebel or complain, and on the other hand they would not strive. It was folly to think of building a comfortable house, when there was no-one left to occupy it, or to earn money which could bring no sweetness. So most of them sat idly in the streets, or under the roof of the market, and took what food was put before them. The few who worked, like our boatmen, did not care what pay they received. A piece of bread they were glad to get; but when it was a question of money, one lira or five were all much the same.’2
Much of my father’s report is naturally very similar to the experiences of everyone who has done relief work of this kind and it would be irrelevant to quote it here. What does stand out, however, is how very swiftly the relief ships—British, Russian, and American—reached their destination, and how admirable their collaboration was with the local authorities in the distribution of the stores they brought. In particular, my father was immensely impressed by the Russian sailors, who were, he wrote, ‘a revelation to those who did not know the quiet common sense, the tactful sympathy and the unassuming heroism of the moujik. The Russians were the only people who always had everything on the spot.’
The American ship, carrying twenty-four nurses and three doctors and fitted out to receive two hundred hospital patients and one thousand refugees, brought clothing for two thousand persons, medical stores for five hospitals and large quantities of food and tools. But already by the time it arrived, the greatest need was no longer at Messina but at Catania, where twenty-five thousand refugees from Messina had arrived, and it was there that much of this relief was devolved. One thing that also strikes one about the report is the unobtrusive and tactful manner in which all this help, which included the shipment of three thousand houses and the foundation of an agricultural school, was bestowed. ‘The aim of the Americans’, my father wrote, ‘has never been to act independently of the Italians, but simply to put at the service of the Italians their eyes and brain as well as their money.’
Of his own part in the work, the report says nothing, but I think that those weeks, which undoubtedly damaged his health, but during which he was able to lead again a man’s life of active work, were probably the happiest he had known for many years. When he returned to Milan to report, it was with the intention of returning to Sicily as soon as possible to continue the work, but a letter to his father mentions, very much in passing, ‘a little attack of pleurisy, very slight’—hardly surprising, since in Messina he had not taken his clothes off by day or night; he had also been up to his neck in sea-water during a storm, helping to tug in a rowing-boat carrying stores, which had nearly capsized. There was no question of his returning to Sicily, and indeed hardly had he returned to Milan than an order reached him to report to Washington, with a view to taking up an appointment as secretary to the American Legation in Tangier. By the end of March he was writing from Washington, eagerly looking forward to his new post. ‘The correspondence with Tangier is fascinating. It is only a question of how thorough one is, how much work one has to do.’ But before he could take up his appointment, he had another haemorrhage, undoubtedly the result of his exertions in Sicily, and it was not until the summer that he could rejoin his family in Italy.
It is at this point that my own clear recollections of my father begin. Looking at his letters, I realise that, long before then, he had both spent much time with me and had written about me, in a tone in which humour is allied to the prophetic hopes common to all young parents. Before I was three months old, he was writing that I seemed ‘to have been born with company manners’, and three months later, he was asking for his old books of French nursery songs because he was sure that I would be musical. ‘She loves to be sung to, but weeps bitterly at any sad tune.’
‘I have a notion’, he says in another letter of the same period, ‘that she may be like Justine [his sister]. Her roars of rage are so loud and so funny, and she is able to change with such speed from despair to smiles.’
By the time I was three he was writing, from a sanatorium in the Adirondacks, enchanting long letters to me. One of them, which contained a long story about a chipmunk, ended with four kisses of different shapes: ‘Fat kiss for Fatty; Kite-shaped kiss for the Mischief; Giant heart-shaped kiss—’ml; and Small bullet kiss for the bullet-headed girl.’
In the following winter, at St. Moritz, my education in skating and dancing began. ‘She is not yet an expert skater,’ says one letter rather testily, ‘seems unable to bend her knees’ (I was four years old) but soon after progress is reported: ‘She cannot get her edges yet, but skates ahead with fine form and swing.’ In that same winter, too, before a children’s party at the Kulm, ‘We have been dancing with her till she can do the valse and two-step very nicely’; and I am also reported as talking and reading fluently in English, Italian, and German. My father, later on, wrote to a friend, ‘She has become a speaker of German, and is rapidly ceasing to be a speaker of English. “Stand here, horse, to the post, I want to hang you on!”’
Iris in 1907
My own personal memories of being with my father only begin with the summer of my seventh birthday, which occurred at Camaldoli, in the heart of the great pine-forests that stretch along the ridge of the Apennines; and these memories are inextricably mingled with the smell of freshly-sawn wood and of wild strawberries. Every day, my father would walk up with me to the clearing where the great timber logs were sawn, and when we came back I would hunt for strawberries in the sunny meadow beneath the hotel, bringing a few to him on a large green chestnut-leaf. My mother dressed me in long white muslin frocks, old-fashioned even then, and large, floppy muslin hats, held on by a wide blue ribbon under the chin; the brim flopped into my eyes, as I bent to pick the fruit.
On our walks my father would pause, sitting upon a log, and then we would act scenes which were, as I now realise, my first history and geography lessons.
“You are the Little Duke and I am your faithful Squire, and we have just set out from Normandy for the Holy Land. Which way shall we go?”
The next memory, I think, belongs to the same autumn. Every morning, after breakfast, I would visit my father in his bedroom at Varenna and say a verse of poetry to him—from the Lays of Ancient Rome, or Hiawatha or Henry V’s speech before Agincourt. This I loved—the sounds of the words themselves and also, of course, the pleasure of being approved of. But on one particular occasion I failed.
‘Fair stood the wind for France—As we our sails advance.’
That was easy enough; but the end of the verse was too difficult:
‘And be our oriflamme today—the Helmet of Navarre.’
Never had I heard of an oriflamme before, nor apparently did my father explain it to me—I am a little vague still—and when I got to that line, I broke down.
“Never mind, Fatty,” my father said cheerfully, “you’ll say it right tomorrow.”
But the next day I broke down again, and again, quite patiently but firmly, my father said that I must repeat it right tomorrow. At the third failure I ran sobbing from the room—but not so far as not to hear, through the half-open door, my mother say:
“Aren’t you a little hard on her, Bayard? She is so very little!”
“Not too little,” he firmly replied, “to distinguish between knowing something and half knowing it.”
It was a distinction which—unlike the word oriflamme—I at once understood, and have never since forgotten.
Any impression, however, that my whole time with my father was spent in lessons, or that I was in awe of him, would be quite wrong. The quickness of thought and movement, the infectious gaiety which charmed his friends, was no less irresistible to a small child. I can never remember his ‘talking down’ to me, but I can remember an occasional feeling of slight bewilderment, a wish that I could understand better what it would be so fascinating to know.
During that Italian summer my father’s plans had taken a new turn. If he could not accept a regular appointment, surely he could take up, at his own pace, the study of British colonial administration, and fit himself to give a course on the subject at Harvard? His old university welcomed the plan and so, on his return, did his wife. ‘I have set my face towards Harvard’, he wrote to Mrs. Griscom, ‘and the feet will follow. Meanwhile we intend to spend parts of a number of years in investigating the British Empire, travelling to as many colonies as possible …’